After many weeks of testing, Google has finally found me worthy of disseminating their infectious email service. I have 4 accounts available, free to the first lucky readers who contact me requesting one.

The catch? You have to tell me the name of your favourite teacher, and why you thought s/he was so great.

As for my Gmail experience, I love most of the interface, but there are a couple of things that tick me off:

• You can't save a draft copy of a message
• You can't add recipients from the contact list window (which is annoying when you're trying to send out a message to a large group of people)
• Deleting a single message, instead of a "conversation" (related responses) is harder than it needs to be.

I'm sure Google will get around to all of these issues soon (they've mentioned that they're working hard on the contact-to-recipient thing), and am happy to recommend the service, despite my complaints and the negative press the service has been getting from the internet's well-intentioned Paranoia Police.

Hackers have finally caught up to current video technology. Sophos, a respected tech company with virus and antispam products, is reporting on a new virus, called Rbot-GR. In addition to allowing hackers to access passwords, files, software keys, and almost anything else stored on, or connected to, your machine, it also lets them see and listen through your webcam if you have one installed.

This article provides more details and some suggestions on how to protect yourself.

I'd suggest a little black cloak that you can throw over your webcam, kinda like the ones they used over the Palantir seeing stones in the Lord of the Rings.

Hmm...too geeky? Yeah, thought so.

Flew back from Toronto late last night. Once again, Westjet staff were friendly and helpful, though not quite as funny.

Late into the flight, I started eating the pizza that Cori and Phil had brought for me, and asked the flight attendant for some iced tea. When I finished the drink, I put the glass down and started to consider asking for a refill. Before I could even finish the thought, a Westjetter appeared over my shoulder and topped up my cup. Nice.

Otherwise, the flight was a total circus. There were at least a half dozen screaming children, and I got to observe several different parenting styles. My favourite exchange was between the woman across the aisle from me and her daughter, who was doing a lot of whiny-type crying. In teacher's college, we touch on the idea of classroom conflict management, and asking pointless, rhetorical questions to make a display of your authority is frowned upon. This illustrates why:

Mother: Don't you ever get tired of crying?
Daughter: [silence]
Mother: I said, don't you ever get tired of crying?
Daughter: [silence]
Mother: Answer my question! Don't you ever get tired of crying?
Daughter: [angrily] No!
Mother: Why not?
Daughter: Because you keep hurting my feelings!

Flew from Calgary to Toronto today, with WestJet. The picture shown here is of a shiny new engine, aglow with warnings and icons. Apparently no people are allowed in the engine. Perhaps reasonable to a plane maintenance crew, but odd at 30,000 feet.

In addition to cheap flights, WestJet is known for in-flight comedy schtick like the rumoured racing of toilet paper rolls down the aisles.

On this trip, the flight crew were friendly, funny, and little things made me smile, like the dozen different ways of saying "Thank you" printed around the edge of their napkins.

The head comedian/flight attendant commented that anyone caught smoking would be asked to leave the aircraft immediately, but upon arrival thanked the smokers for their patience. "Please light up only in designated areas," he said, "and if you are unsure where these areas are, just follow your flight crew as they disembark the aircraft."

He finished with a song, to the tune of "This Old Man:"

We love you, you love us
WestJet's faster than the bus
We've got style and personality
If you marry one of us you'll fly for free!
It cost them nothing, and now I'll never pay to fly Air Canada again.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a parody of the American Department of Homeland Security's emergency preparedness web site (thanks Gillian!). I'd seen the parody page before, but the second look motivated me to have a look at the real government site.

The information is broken up into sections, like "Biological Threat", "Chemical Threat", "Nuclear Blast", etc. There's even a section for Natural Disasters, so you can check to see if you're simply a victim of a disinterested God, and not an agenda-driven terrorist.

One thing I found very interesting was this description of a Chemical Attack:

A chemical attack is the deliberate release of a toxic gas, liquid or solid that can poison people and the environment.

Hmm. I'm bet there are dozens, if not hundreds, of corporations doing exactly that at this very moment. And I bet that much of it is overlooked, or even given legal justification by the government.

What this means is that we, as a society, have come to accept or reject an action based on its context, rather than its content. Dispersing a canister of aerosol anthrax on a subway: terrorism. Dumping tons of radioactive or toxic chemicals into public airspace and waterways: capitalism!

One graphic from the web site, shown above, is accompanied by the following suggestion:

Many sick or dead birds, fish or small animals are also cause for suspicion.

This is important information to have, because when I see lots of dead animals, that even other animals won't eat, I normally think they must've just committed group suicide, in some kind of critter-Jonestown event.

Actually, I'm pretty sure every single dead fish or bird you find washed up on a shore is the result of corporate, or governmental terrorism... er, capitalism. So here's the question: If we're supposed to regard the appearance of dead birds and fish as serious enough to indicate a terrorist chemical attack, in the absence of said attack, what are these deaths indicating? And why aren't we spending money and time on that?

Thankfully, my taxpayer dollars aren't contributing to this travesty of a public service web site. My money is tied up in the 1 billion dollar Canadian gun registry. But don't get me started about that.